


in another universe, i deserve you

by thunderousbreak



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fluff, Happy Ending, M/M, Reincarnation, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:40:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22088056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thunderousbreak/pseuds/thunderousbreak
Summary: Bucky loves Steve, and in every lifetime, Steve lets him.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	in another universe, i deserve you

**Author's Note:**

> an extremely late birthday gift for the wonderful  deen . my infatuation with soulmates thickens and I hope I did justice to our late night rambles. you do deserve the best of the best after all. I love you bud.

The story goes as any fable that dwells in the pages of a book; they were one. A coalesced element that lingered in the hidden chambers of the planet, an enigma forged in the heat of molten lava and cooled in the icy crust that encompassed it. Like many encrypted languages lost in the passages of the past, they were as exquisite as the unknown, a tantalising mystery with no beginning or end.

When Steve Rogers’ cries were exhibited to the world on a cold December night where the wind howled and rain pelted on the window during a storm as ferocious as the freshly unearthed soul, it was evident that their gift had arrived. A year later on a wonderful summer morning where the sky hummed and the clouds streamed warmth like a waterfall to the bordering ground, Bucky Barnes fascinated gasp silenced the excited chatter surrounding him.

Where one went the other would surely follow. The gears of time conducted to a song that proclaimed it.

From the Pangea to a continental shift that splintered earth's land. From the merciless wars of west to unyielding classrooms in the morning. The sun would descend, the moon would rise, and in the transition from night to day they would exist as their hearts intended them too.

Evolving from one body: one soul. A riddle where one was the words scripted on the paper and the other the flow of speech to recite it. Should Bucky Barnes be the poem then Steve Rogers was the poet; without one another they ceased to exist. Should he be a soldier then Steve was his sniper. Should he be the sky, then Steve would be his stars. To be completed, they would always need each other.

Their love was predicted in the mosaic of time, illustrations of them throughout history, together one minute and gone the next. For them, it was decreed to meet, and it was decreed to secede. Endlessly, they would long, wish, search for the other. A visage printed on their pupil; a treasure immeasurable to man. But not for long.

Sharing a single breath and cherishing the warmth that embraced every cell, every minuscule move, but they would have to exhale and with it, lose not only each other but themselves. For the stories they shared between them could only last for a mere second, ending faster than the hands on a clock which refused to pause for them to feel each other’s heart.

Bucky lost Steve in the war, and with him, the peace of mind he always took for granted.

But not all was lost. Nature would reclaim the land stolen from it regardless of when and how, and just like the persistent roots of an incredible oak tree, they would meet. Eventually.

Reuniting on lands where they had once walked or have never travelled before. Intimate and familiar. Dazed and exhilarated. A wise man returning to his home,

Sometimes it would be Bucky who would seek Steve like a bayou thrown out into the sea and waiting for their hands to meet. Other times it would be Steve, disguised as a painter and infiltrating Bucky’s home with no remorse in sight, his face harbouring a knowing smile when he was sighted.

“You have made me wait for quite a while, Bucky,” Steve would say, blue eyes meeting his and drawing him in. “Come, won’t you sit?”

Every time, as memories promised, Steve was as beautiful as his former self. An intricate array of glorious cells, composing a masterpiece doused in grandeur. Breathless and destroyed, Bucky would stare at the man his heart had yearned for before it even beat.

“The roads were weathered by storms I couldn’t prevail,” he would explain, or perhaps another reasoning he half-heartedly conjured from his trip, footsteps inclining to the star which guided him out of darkness and into the light. “I came as fast as I could.”

“You’re here now, my love. That is all that matters anymore.”

That was it, was it not? Stubborn to the fault, they would fight and trial and conquer any shortcomings to reach the other. All for the chance of inhaling serenity and holding it in the palm of their hands before fate crushed it. All to know that they had found the only person that would ever matter, ever again. They were there now; it would be the only thing that ever mattered.

Like many times before and the many times that would come after, Bucky always found that his head fits perfectly against Steve’s chest, a homecoming that he couldn’t describe. With relief soaking his bones, waves swashing gently, the sun baking them slowly, he gazed into kind eyes that he knew better than himself.

After days, months, years, lost at sea and battling for salvation, he would finally be home.

Calm. Content. Complete.

Which made this eon no different to the rest. They would meet once more. But not in the cornfields where Steve tended his crops, not on the road where Bucky travelled with nothing but spices in his sack, and certainly not in a battlefield where their enemy wore a face of their beloved and bullet sent their sanity into a boiling point of agony.

This time, they were in the future.

When Bucky closed his eyes, inviting slumber as the blackness haunting the night consumed his sight, he dreamt. Peculiar, specific and recurring dreams which felt too little like fabrications and too much like history.

As a child he would wake in his cot and struggle to breathe, glistening oceans overwhelming his vision as he saw a motionless body on the floor. Chest suspiciously still and hands arched in a fist, terror and determination engraved into the creases of his companion. He couldn’t see a face or even try to identify it, but his heart clenched in vain and his hands scrambled desperately as his lips shouted words into a vacuum of air.

A boy then trespassed his mind. Golden locks, affirmative smiles, intense stares and kindness that came so rarely to people even now. Without knowing who the face belonged to, Bucky knew that he would venture into creature infested woods and unbalanced terrain to find him, should he ever leave. It was an inkling, but he guessed that it was because he did many a time. Shadowed his footsteps like he was succumbed to follow him forever.

Like he wanted to.

Then, there was a war. His body was planted in the treetops as he drowned in armour top tight, too ill, too wrong for his impure body. Around him, battle cries and anguished screams pulsated to the sky, bullets and knives searing past. Devoted to his spot, unable to move or lift his eyes from the figure at who they stared, he was employed by a duty he nourished into the admiration he felt.

As a man- the same one he’d seen in Vegas as they gambled in the casino and the same one from corridors of his manor where his servants murmured radically under their breaths, danced with a shield that was built for his fingers, watching Bucky to ensure that no one entered the cocoon of protection he had built. They had both built for one another.

But when he dreamt of falling, dog tags not belonging to him (they never did), death lingering on his fingertips; _Bucky, hang on. Grab my hand. No!_ ; he learnt that the boy could not protect him from the prying hands of demise. It was ordered for him to be silenced with a deafening thud through his chest, life depleting from his body and eyes stalking the world.

Those dreams- enactments- visions- memories? Whatever they could be, dominated his mind, fuelling an irrational sense of unbelonging. Pulling one foot from the present to a past he summoned from reading too many books or something of the sort. This wasn’t his time, they insisted, he didn’t belong.

Choosing to turn a blind eye, he lived on as normally as he could.

As normal as fear from a war he’d never heard of or been in could allow. As normal as secretive meetings and mischievous laughs, righteous glory and sublime scenery could allow. As normal as being completely and wholeheartedly in eternal love with someone who didn’t exist would permit.

And so, it didn’t startle him like it should have that his father insults felt old. As though they had been used countless times before, and the pain they would once afflict were now nothing but dull stings that healed shortly after reception. His father's hatred and dismay to him was almost expected, and surely that was barbaric.

_You will never amount to anything. Not like that. Words don’t sell, kid, not yours anyway._

He couldn’t fault himself for finding that he harboured an intense disdain to fighting, death, and violence. Deep in his hollow chest, where the ache of a missing heart bothered him, he knew that he had eaten his fair shares. Civil wars, territorial ones, world ending tragedies which weren’t even half of it. He had paid his dues, had he not?

So, he went to the gym, built himself a body he heard the boy in his dreams love and praise, but he stayed clear from the activities that he couldn’t find the interest to indulge. Learning words and languages seemed much more intriguing to his nifty fingers and quick mind. Like I was made for this, he mused. Perhaps he was.

He approved and as did the boy.

The process, the people, and the flow, it all seemed inexplicably familiar and yet nothing like he had ever thought possible. His life felt as though it was an adaptation of an old movie with the same cast but different storyline. For the hundredth time running.

To answer the questions which shadowed him he would have to find the boy. To find him, he was under the sky that sheltered them many times before.

Night; shimmering stars; guileless eyes searching for constellations, and a short breeze to caress the hair off his eyes. Bucky Barnes waited.

He had found Orion, composition and beauty just as boundless as the Greeks declared, the intricate lines making it pulsate amongst the dormant lights. Son of Poseidon, the most handsome man to have walked the detailed lands of Earth. Smiling gently, he thought to himself, found you. Perseus, son of Zeus, another God sentenced to infinity occupied the space neighbouring the stars that configured his cousin, imploding luminously.

The sky was a mystery, a honeypot of awe, birth, destruction, and the production of the life that thrummed through Bucky’s vein. The conception of miracles began in the sky. Oh, how his hand yearned to graze the milky way, capturing the throbbing stars in the palm of his hands and blow them back into the air, watching them flutter to the abyss and reinstate their position.

In the corner of his eyes, as he observed the second most beautiful thing in the universe, a person sat beside him, heat radiating into Bucky’s skin and warming the chills of anticipation. “Found you,” a voice whispered into his ears, fanning the cool flesh with their breath.

There was only one way he could explain Steve’s homecoming: a single metaphor he had carefully constructed in one of his many sleepless nights and it went as such. After months of cold, an ineluctable freeze detaining the warmth which had unknowingly manifested in his chest, his chest began to melt. A light, flickering and fragile but as vibrant as an inferno, emerged from the tundra.

The feeling was indescribable, but if Bucky had to explain it somehow, he’d say that it was returning to a comfy fireplace, fire ravaging the wood, sheathed in a blanket feeling safe, warm, and serene. Blistering winds howled outside, skating on the windowpane attempting to invade the golden haze and submerge it in terror. Doors locked, curtains closed, flames dancing in intricate compositions of freedom, he was untouchable.

Home was where the heart was and his had never left Steve. It was embedded in Steve’s chest, unknown to the man himself, beating in sacred union- a mirror. A simultaneous performance of pure survival.

Dropping his hand, the constellations drifted out of view, windswept. He turned to the voice. “Took you long enough.”

Sunlit hair ablaze and smile as delectable as his scent, Bucky was compelled to stare. Could not will himself to look away for even a second, fearful that if he looked away for anything longer than the second it took to blink Steve would disappear.

Steve smiled brightly, enough to power all extinguishing bulbs in the sky, blue eyes competing with the galaxies splattered in ink in Bucky’s notebook. “Distance sweetens the heart, does it not?”

There was a gentle breeze that wrapped around them at that moment, a kind exhale of warmth that nourished the bones in a blanket of contentment. Like he had for so long now, Bucky stared. This was Steve. This was home.

“I looked for you,” he confessed, voice just above a whisper, eyes exploring his. “Searched night and day for you, hoping you’d appear even if for a second. Felt like I couldn’t breathe because I was incomplete. It was awful.”

Smiling kindly, understanding to his last breath, Steve replied, “have I ever left you before this? As long as this heart beats, it will beat your name. And as long as these hands and feet work, they will travel the entire universe should they have to, just to be by your side. It is a promise I will never fail to keep.”

Without a second thought, he threw himself onto Steve, arms so much more stable and controlled, their heights matched. Immediately, Steve’s own hands enclosed Bucky, an act they hadn't done in decades but found unimaginably easy. Their holds tightened for a brief second but considerably.

Bucky had been parched for water for so long he had lost hope of ever finding it. Yet staggering through the scorching sandstorms, skin scabbed and torn apart by the minuscule grains of sand, he found it. Arms engrossing Steve, he had discovered a water well, the liquid cool and bountiful, perfect for a traveller who had been deprived for so long.

Now, holding him close and drinking in as much as he could in those few precious seconds, he felt refreshed. Renewed. Energised and motivated, braced for another storm to come and ravage him.

A current of want coursed through him, coupled with immense love that could only be reserved for the patchwork of blue in Steve’s eyes. Elevated, his heart soared. They fit, the two of them, like two puzzle pieces coming together to form a picture.

The Greeks had proclaimed that soulmates were two halves of a whole, a person who was torn apart in a big bang, segregating their beings into the ruins of land, forcing them to find each other to become complete once more. After craving him for so long, he was here.

His breaths sang notes of praise because they all belonged to Steve Rogers. The man who withstood debilitating anxiety, who conceived life in delicate strokes of his wrist, who laughed with ferocity and loved with no end. All for him.

Aligning their heartbeats and burrowing his face far into Steve’s neck so that all his senses were enveloped by his soulmate, he let out a sigh of adoration.

“Never leave me again,” instructed Bucky.

Tightening his arms, Steve promised, “as long as this heart beats its yours.”

Eventually, they would be forced apart by forces they could never compete with. But if there was one thing they knew, could hold onto for some semblance of calm, it was that they would meet again in a different lifetime, leading different lives, being different people, inexplicably perfect for each other.

Bucky would love Steve forever and in all the lives they would live, Steve would let him.


End file.
